From among them one could gather out a whole menagerie of the 'selcouth' beasts and birds and creeping things that have been banished from solid earth into the limbo of Faery and Romance. They furnish examples of nearly all the root-ideas and typical tales which folklorists have discovered in the vast jungle of popular legends and superstitions--the Supernatural Birth, the Life and Faith Tokens, the Dragon Slayer, the Mermaid and the Despised Sister, Bluebeard of the Many Wives, the Well of Healing, the Magic Mirror, the Enchanted Horn, the Singing Bone, the Babes in the Wood, the Blabbing Popinjay, the Counterpart, the Transformation, the Spell, the Prophecy, the Riddle, the Return from the Grave, the Dead Ride, the Demon Lover, the Captivity in Faeryland, the Seven Years' Kain to Hell, and a host of others. Certain of them, like _Thomas the Rhymer_ and _Young Tamlane_, are 'fulfilled all of Faery.' One can read in them how deeply the old superstition, which some would attribute to a traditional memory of the pre-Aryan inhabitants of Western Europe--to the 'barrow-wights,' pigmies, or Pechts who dwelt in or were driven for shelter to caves and other underground dwellings of the land--had struck its roots in the popular fancy. Probably Mr. Andrew Lang carries us as far as we can go at present in the search for origins and affinities, when he says that the belief in fairies, and in their relatives, the gnomes and brownies, is 'a complex matter, from which tradition, with its memory of earth-dwellers, is not wholly absent, while more is due to a survival of the pre-Christian Hades, and to the belief in local spirits--the Vius of Melanesia, the Nereids of ancient and modern Greece, the Lares of Rome, the fateful Maerae and Hathors--old imaginings of a world not yet dispeopled of its dreams.' The elfin-folk of the Scottish ballads have some few traits that are local and national; but, on the whole, they conform pretty closely to a type that has now become well marked in the literature as well as in the popular beliefs of European countries. The fairies have been, among the orders of supernatural beings, the pets and favourites of the poets, who have heaped their flowers of fancy above the graves of the departed Little Folk. We suspect that the more graceful and gracious touches in the Fairy Ballad are the renovating work of later hands than the elder balladist; and in the two typical Scottish examples that have been mentioned, it is not difficult to find the mark of Sir Walter.